To the light house

 Hello Lerners....

To The Lighthouse' is written by Virginia Woolf in 1920. It is a revolutionary book. Woolf was attempting something quite new in English novel. She wanted to capture, in words , the nature of human consciousness - What it actually feels to be alive.The novel at some extent - It is a biography of writer herself - Virginia Woolf. readers can feel during reading novel that...

"One isn't always hurrying to turn over the page, urgently wanting to find out what happens next." 

'To The Lighthouse' is in the category of the 20th century literature. So, we may assume that what is it about. Obviously reading modernist literature do not provide the pleasure or delight but it creates anxiety and it constantly hammering on readers mind. Thought story of novel is too short, the novel is full of length. One can describe the plot and the main concept of the novel in short also. 

"Arnold Bennett summarized the novel like..." 

"A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a Lighthouse. At the end of some of them reach to the Lighthouse in small boat. That is the externality of the plot."

In above review , Arnold Bennett deliberately emphasised on the plot's 'externality'. In the novel , something is more deeper rather than the surface actions which is going on in life. At the first sight it seems like that the whole events which are described by Woolf themselves quite unimportant.

What is Feminism?

Feminism is a social theory or movement with the purpose of advancing the status of females and protecting their legal rights due to the sexual discriminations and inequalities in the man-dominated society. 

The word "feminism" was first used by Charles Fourier in 1837 and since then it has been gradually known by people in the world. “Feminism represents one of the most important social, economic, and aesthetic revolutions of modern times.” As a matter of fact, the history of feminist movements consists of three "waves”. The First Feminism Wave took place at the turn of the 20th century, in which Virginia Woolf was a prominent representative. 

During this period, women’s suffrage movements was organized to defend women’s right to vote. Then, accompanied by the women’s liberation movement, the second wave was unveiled in the 1960s. The focus of this wave was women’s legal and social equality against patriarchy. As a continuation of the second wave, third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s.

Feminism in "To The Lighthouse"

Virginia Woolf has been criticized by many for her feminist streak in her works .Her A Room of Her Own though praised for her illuminating facts and regarded as one of the greatest feminist classic of the century made her a target and some of the critics even felt her wok suffered because of her feminism. 

But, what her critics ignore, is the fact that what was close to her heart was the androgynous nature of the creative artist. This paper aims at highlighting an important fact about Woolf’s creative instinct which was against this dichotomy of male and female and projected the unity of mind, which took both the male and female perceptions to create a new artistic experience in all its spirit. 

The paper is also my tribute to my favorite writer who is and always be my inspiration to continue to look at every work with both sides of the spectrum and not just my own female experience. To the Lighthouse seemed to be an appropriate work to explicitly show the androgynous mind of Woolf with its symbolic character, themes and stream of consciousness. To the Lighthouse, although unremarkable in character depiction by today's standards, was a radical departure from the norm in the period in which it was written. 

At that time, women were expected to conform to tradition, to remain subservient to men. Virginia Woolf, in creating Lily Briscoe defied convention by allowing her to assert her independence. While the novel remained traditional in the sense that it included female characters who deferred to men, the inclusion of a woman such as Briscoe, an independent thinker, shocked many readers in the Modernist Era. 

As a woman writer, Virginia Woolf formed her unique feminine consciousness which was rooted in her life experiences and social background back then. In her lifetime, she dedicated herself to the feminist literary criticism and uttered women’s rights through her works. Marcus claims that: Woolf’s relationship with feminism is a symbiotic one. Her explicit feminist politics, her concern and fascination with gender identities and with other women’s lives, histories, and fictions have shaped her writing profoundly.